The Medieval Church · c. 796–801
The Alcuinian Bible
Alcuin of York and the scriptorium of Tours · c. 735 – 804
What it is
A corrected Vulgate produced at Tours at Charlemagne's request, standardising a text that had drifted through four centuries of copying, and written in the new Caroline minuscule with word spacing and punctuation.
Why it lasted
The Bible the medieval West actually read, copied from Tours across Europe in single volumes for the first time. Its script is the ancestor of the roman type on this page, so the reform reaches further than the text it was made for.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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